Ph.D. student wins prestigious ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation award

Jordan Harrison, graduating this April with her Ph.D., has been awarded the 2017 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award from Rackham Graduate School. 

This award carries a cash prize and recognizes exceptional and unusually interesting work produced by doctoral students. 

Harrison was a Hillman scholar and graduated in 2017. During her time at UMSN, she participated in multiple interdisciplinary studies, including an analysis of genetic risk factors for cognitive dysfunction in heart failure patients and a study of symptoms and interventions in older women with heart failure at skilled nursing facilities. Her work on the heart failure studies, in which many participants had a history of cancer, stimulated her interest in heart failure in breast cancer survivors.

For her dissertation, she examined longitudinal changes in health-related quality of life among women who develop heart failure after breast cancer treatment in order to inform development of targeted interventions for symptom management. The focus of her long-term research trajectory is symptom science to enhance quality of life in patients with chronic illness. 

Harrison is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research, School of Nursing, and a National Clinician Scholar at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.